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In this troubled economy, candidates have to answer questions about jobs, and how to protect American jobs from being sent overseas. The New Hampshire Labor Bureau says the state has lost more than 26,000 manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2007. And state officials expect the manufacturing industry will lose around 2,700 more jobs by 2014. The decline is being felt around the country, and local businesses are struggling to compete with foreign markets.

We wanted to hear what those job losses mean to the workers, and how they rebuild their lives after their workplaces are forced to shut down. After 60 years in business, Moosehead Manufacturing Company closed up shop last year because of overseas competition. The company had two plants, in the rural Maine towns of Monson and Dover-Foxcroft. Former workers, the skeleton crew, and even the company president were seeking answers and a new direction. They wondered what would come next as the place that was the center of their lives closed its doors. Sarah Archambault spoke to them, and produced a story for the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.

But there’s some good news for Moosehead and its workers. The company is now under new leadership and has re-opened, consolidating the manufacturing process in the Monson plant. They’ve rehired about a third of the employees who had been laid off.

(Photo courtesy of Moosehead Furniture)

Democrats are gathering in Denver this week for their national convention, and Republicans get together in St. Paul, Minn., next week. Today on Word of Mouth, we look at some of the issues facing future presidents.

Seventy-five years ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as America’s thirty-second president. One week after his inauguration, he took to the airwaves, to speak directly to the American people.

FDR delivered thirty informal radio speeches between 1933 and 1944, spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War. He used the growing power of radio to invite listeners into the White House, and to join them in their living rooms.

What will be the next version of the fireside chat? Sam Ford is research affiliate at the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, and is director of customer insights at the New York-based strategic communications firm Peppercom, Inc. He wrote about Web 2.0 as the key to connecting government and business leaders with their constituents for Business Week. He joins us from New York to tell us about how communications technology can revolutionize transparency in business and government.

(Photo by Thomas Hawk)